The Last Living Grocer and His Brand-New Mop

Somerville Way

The old man in ear flaps
took a shine to me, apparently
I remind him of his grandson,
who just got his tonsils out at thirty-five.
"Medically amazing," he says,
measuring my car to the curb,
every inch a risk of getting nicked.

"Three feet," he says,
putting away the tape measure,
"too far from shore."
What’s a bird’s grace
but the width of a hair?

"You should hug the curb,
"hug it," he says,
hugging the air.

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Astronomy as Revolution

"Come see Jupiter! Come see the moon!"
says the sidewalk astronomer
poking keyholes in the fog
with his glow-in-the-dark
hand-painted telescope by Candlestick Park,

Unlike the first balloonist, a French fop,
who, once aloft, became lofty
and refused to come back to Earth,
San Francisco's astronomer
keeps his feet on the ground.
If you're curious, climb his ladder.
"The world," says our hippie Copernicus,
"should revolve around its people."

Unlike the balloonist,
who coveted celebrity, celestial things
like the art of ballooning
and ballooning fame,
our astronomer loves the whole globe.
His glasses slide off his nose.

By looming into the divine,
the balloonist doomed the king of France,
whose divinity dimmed
in the shadow of the great balloon.
Liberated from crown and skyline,
the peasant class looked
to a kingdom of God with whom
a subject might speak directly.

San Francisco's astronomer
dreams of a French revolution
among the stargazers of America.
Celebrity egos, bigwigs,
and all those blabber heads shall
be rolling off the guillotine.
The cosmos makes a mirror image
of our vibrating beds.

A baby in a stroller lets go
a lemon balloon.

Arenas renamed by banks,
Candlestick Park lost
to the name of a computer,
our tie-dyed, wide-eyed stargazer
gives back our old name anew:
Candlestick Park.

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Stalin's Love

"She is dead," Stalin wrote
upon the death of his first wife,
"and with her have died
my last warm feelings for all humanity."

The suicide of his second wife
was successful.
The suicide of his first son
was less successful,
which drew his father's contempt:
"Idiot couldn't shoot straight."

His daughter, whom he loved,
told of a time he was preoccupied,
pacing, smoking, spitting into a spittoon.
His pet parrot began to imitate
the sound of his spitting,
which enraged him. With his pipe
he beat the bird to death.

"Death solves all problems," he wrote.
"No man, no problem."
Execution--individual and mass--
solved Stalin's problems.
When the census showed
the population decreasing,
he ordered every member
of the census board shot.
The second census found
a larger population.

At the height of his power,
pleased to celebrate
a triumph of engineering,
a shining example
of the Stalinist system,
Stalin visited a canal
built by slave labor.
Unfortunately, the canal
had been built too shallow
to convey warships.
It was useless.
Over 200,000 had died in its construction,
the workers buried in the banks
of a canal unable
to convey Stalin's warships.

Stalin loved American
cowboy movies, which he cursed,
analyzed from a Marxist perspective,
watching again and again, leaning back,
sipping sour Georgian wine.
His toadies gathered around the long table,
swallowing vodka, never sure
if their night might not end
before the firing squad.
Forced jollity rocked the banquet.
Along with a sense of self-preservation,
every man shows his sense of humor.
Stalin put tomatoes
on the chairs of men about to sit down.

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The Space in Which My Car's No Longer Parked

My '85 Chevy Citation, rusted, red,
frankly a piece of shit,
but its theft makes me doubt
my humblest assumptions
about the worth of people.
A void deeper than a pocket
in which a wallet might have bulged,
or a hook where a jacket hung,
or a cradle tilted on its side,
or a pillow under which a lover leaves
a letter or strand of hair like a question mark,

Emptiness can swallow you whole.
Like velvet around a masterpiece
yellow police tape forbids entrance
to a murder scene. The space
where the body fell
stands up:
a chalk outline, a white rope
curved like a woman
walks towards me, stops.
Her empty sagging sillhuette
holds the scenery.
Some spaces only everything fills.

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Advice

Escape your condohood:
the daily din of sex and vacuums,
barnacle patios, gossips dripping
hesaidshesaid,
Nannies tripping on toys
spit identical shits
at test-pressed kids.

Escape the skyscraper blocks
where elevators go up and down in moods,
turnstiles hand out tourists in doses,
stoplights change their minds,
pigeons nod, shopping bags collide,
old lovers bump into each other,
briefcases, whatnots.

Go to the country.
Single out your slice.
Lay back and birth your own place:
falling stars,
fickle mercury,
slapstick galaxies.

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Halloween

Boarding the school bus,
you face the beasts
in plastic wardrobes.
You forgot to wear
the dead's gross regalia:
green greasepaint,
dayglo fangs.

You are monstrous:
You are a polo shirt,
brown loafers, clean duds.
You are a head of hurt.

Your school calendar lost
to pocket crumples,
you must go as yourself
into the lunch line
among the superheroes and skeletons,
you, Mr. November, looking oddly normal--
normal pimples, normal tater tots--
squeezing in your palm
your pink retainer.

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I Should be Next

Not the lunch line bully
who bellies up to the pizza.
Not the cheater who scrawls
the periodic table on his palms.
Not the lazyboy whose Saint Bernard
ate the quadratics, honest,
and a cardboard Washington Monument.

I am the meek.
Zirconium = zr.
I handmade my Monument
from paper towel tubes.

Not the altar boy who bites his thumbnail
and blows the crescent moon onto a pew.

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Gruntled and Plussed

Decapitate the words
disgruntled and nonplussed
and you deliver two roots
of theoretical, ungrammatical happiness
you can walk on,
a lack of malcontent and confusion
expressed as more.
Why not say, "I'm quite gruntled this evening.
And you?" "I'm positively plussed."
You can suck joy out of sorrow's root.

Every nothing is pregnant with a thing
that has no no.
In other words, the absence of no
reveals its essence, which is yes.
Detach im, in, dis
and behold the affirmative in bold.

Therefore, why not seize
the brick of green cheese?
Mold yields to the knife,
revealing a core of creamy flab:
perfectly good on bread
which had mold cut off the crust.
Wouldn't you rather be alive
than merely not dead?

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The Pea

Passed around the table
by three big brothers,
the bowl of peas arrived to me
with one pea.

I took the pea.

On my plate
the one pea
starved my eyes,
which were two white peas.

I swallowed hard
the hope and doubt.

The memorable pea,
the lone pea,
the inscrutable pea,
filled my bowl,
the whole green globe
fasting on its axis.

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Forecast

Rain. Wind. Closed,
the post office, the bakery
where ovens clutch cold loaves.
A raccoon, the vigil done,
pokes into a drainpipe
to claim the final pickle.

Past the Blue Robin diner
good girls hush-hush
a camp-out with the bad boys.
Down slash blades of rain:
a lady folds the Picayune over her hairdo
do she won't smell like puppies.
His car, his windshield, his silhouette.
Nothing can save that poodle-do.

A silver motorcycle slashes
its red tail feather around the stop sign--
a pipe’s wink, a neon tavern,
a sidewalk barely fastened to the doorstep
where a drunk wobbles, Punk,.
Up the ramp to charcoal road
the headlight a chip of sun.

The rider sees a walker, a slogger
beating through cold mud
towards yellow windows.
Florida, the rider imagines,
nice to visit, nothing more.
How can a man live
on oranges and bikinis alone?

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Blind Spot

Eye doctors and astronomers
know where it is: it isn't
in your cold heart, nor your poor judgement,
but, literally, the center of your eyeball,
where crisscrossing particles of light
blind you to the most precise spot.
A thumbtack hole
mars the middle of your movie screen.

You're blind to your blind spot
unless you're an astronomer
staring at infinitesimal grains of light
spilled across infinity.
You avoid your blind spot
by gazing a little to the side of the grain,
for averted vision
is the deepest vision.

This isn't exactly scientific.
This is the science of looking
into yourself, your inner space
at just the right angle, at the instant
you're least expecting insight,
like dozing in the tub, or trolling the yard.
A blurred memory or epiphany
clarify suddenly when you squeeze
and toss a sponge.
A bird at the window hovers
where the birdbath shattered last summer,
via your tractor.
Did you suspect rage?
While changing the paper towels
you see you're not in love anymore.
The situation's clear:
time pushing the clock
through the kitchen curtains,
the moon aims
her blinkered eye at you.

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Bad Coffee

In the silence of sports pages
he swallows three creams,
and a frown behind the box scores.
The sink clanks.
She slices a melon, a bagel on a plate
slides across the table.
Honeymoon to silver anniversary
they’ve rolled up the toothpaste.

Home from college, a son and daughter
scorn the nickel-saved-nickel-earned coffee,
mother’s manners,
which seem like servitude,
father's harrumph,
like the throne-thump of a tyrant.

But they underestimate
the weight of a nickel.
You don't miss good coffee
when the bad serves
an old bridge across opposite shifts:
graveyard to early bird.
The kids unlearn only what they know--the worst.
They don’t know how tight a thermos turns,
how civilization, civility--
what’s good, not right--
carries a weary couple
through a long night.

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Loon Mountain

Standing in line for Bob Dylan
a gloriously drunk knucklehead
grins, spits on the sidewalk. I freeze
to listen to his careening stories.
He tells me about his wife,
his soulmate, the pea in his pod,
he's gonna love forever.
"This flower I found in a puddle,"
he tells me, "wiped off
will be very red.
Ever been to Loon Mountain?"
"No," I say. He says at Loon Mountain
Dylan sang "Shooting Star"
while real stars were really shooting.
His wife, the cream in coffee,
the kindling in his campfire,
fell asleep on a quilt.
"I've never been to Dylan,"
I said, "before tonight."
He says tonight her ticket
went to a homeless man in Malden.
Cancer a long time coming
took her last week.
"She'd be glad," he says,
I'm going to Bob Dylan."
The night John Lennon died,
they wept for real, real tears,
and really made love.
He says, "Ever been
to Loon Mountain?"
"No," I say, "but I've been to Dylan."
"I'm walking," he sings,
"through streets that are dead,"
a Dylan line he loves.
He drank burgundy and the harder stuff
the night she died
and played John Lennon.
He says after he finds her in Heaven
they'll kiss and fall in love again, for real,
and then go to John Lennon.
The red flower pinned to his denim collar,
he's leaning back on his bootheels,
not a thing on his mind but a sloppy love
that redeems everything:
His wife, his first, last and only,
would have said this, he said,
"Go on without me, she would say,
to Loon Mountain for Bob Dylan."

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Ice Cream

Next to my elbow
a girl climbs her cart.
"Cookie Dough and Strawberry too Mommy."
Our sweet teeth agree.
Let's load up on lots of frozen fudgy junk
before we're entombed by the next Ice Age.
When gloom comes snuggling into the valley,
nothing will survive but the styrofoam bones
of our mobile homes and rushed, lonely dinners.
No matter: me and the girl
will greet doom's sweet glaciers with spoons.

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Flight

When, crouched in the blackberries,
primitive man got to thinking
(with thoughts like words
or words like thoughts--who knows?)
about the owl in the sky,
he thought, "Did that moonhole up there
just hoot?"

As my buddies fix a satellite dish like a birdbath
I wonder the same.
Mundane things like work and family
distract us from the moonhole's possible hoots.
"Let's plug that puppy in," I say,
listening for the murmurs of my ancestors,
gouging blackberry seeds from my molars.

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Learning to Go

The first walker--a visionary--
walked in dreams.
The skeptics squat, mock
his blueprint of a stroll.

Ambition? Madness? No,
it's the gooseberries so high
that goad him forward. He gropes
and scrapes slate tomes
with odes to vertigo.

After squinting at his knees,
stepping across a daydream,
he stands--not bad--
one foot creeps forward-- smart--
then the other.
Elders grunt at the children,
"That's so wrong."

But brave, amazed babies
clamber up, inspired, and toddle--genius--
towards the off-limits berry bush.
Disciples of the walker
shuffle, plod, amble,
sidle and buckjump
around the fire in a dance of discovery.

Curmudgeons insulate their caves.
"I'm setting up fort where it's safe," they say.
Honey, sweetie-pie, please sit down."

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My Drag Name

I go in drag and with style: pumps, big coif
and my own luscious alias.
My first name (my dog's),
and last (my mother's maiden name):
Nanny Neidlinger.
Go figure the gender.
An Austrian nurse who fluffs the pillows severely,
withholds crackers from the bird,
places Get Well cards halfway closed
and out of reach of the seriously ill,
Nanny Neidlinger, purr wrapped
around her pout, a fishnet fairy
by the clemency of good taste
stars my side.

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The Last Living Grocer and His Brand-New Mop

Talking to flecked apples,
his voice cracks like cabbage.
"The bad ones always hide,"
he would have told
a customer, a wife.
Her tresses thick,
her bucket canary yellow,
her wheels chirping through
this town's last corner grocery,
his brand-new mop, a steamer,
he steers, her handle a mast.
"Up until the 80's
corn flakes sold best.
Now it's those junkie sweets,"
he would have told an apprentice, a son.
Hot broth sloshes,
the mop's dripping mane slaps.
His bones endure the rigmarole,
left, right, up,
around the dairy section,
where tidy stairs twist to his room,
linoleum too clean to touch.
The fire escape opens the world,
a dirty orange
waiting to be rubbed right.
An alley bum rubs sleep from his eyes
as the man and mop edge onto the curb--
miraculous oddity--
and continue mopping down the street,
but settles back against rain-browned boxes,
not so surprised to see
lost as a verb.

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The Most Surprising Thing About Love...

is that it happened once.
To you. This morning.
Candles flat after a blackout,
clocks flash red zeroes.

You lean out the window to see
if morning fits the journey.
The red squirrel in the bird bath
doesn't need your pistachios
or shirtless hello;
his paws pressing birdseed
hold everything he's got.
What you've got tip toes behind you
from the clutch of curtains,
breath soft to say shush
don't worry so much.

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