Selected Poems
Poems from Talk
2019, Bordighera Press
Delicatessen
​
The knob's click and door's creak,
newspapers stacked in rows
along the broken tiles,
pickle barrels spilling brine,
rusted fruit, and a dozen loaves
wrapped in brown paper sleeves,
heaped beyond my reach. These
were the summer evenings
on my father's heels
along the city streets –
before we moved, but I could
read, or believed I could read.
Within the frosted glass I saw
the rolls and squares of meat
and cheese, and twisted brown fish
whose eyes were out. I conceded
to their syntax, broke-in my tongue
on words caught on the palate,
scraped across teeth stretched
across breath: peppered mackerel,
cappicola, mortadella, provolone . . .
I saw the names, and saw them as if,
figured from hunger, they met
the teeth and told them what to do:
prosciutto, pastrami, kalamata, calamari.
Along the sawdust track
that crept beneath the back room's
curtain, another man emerged
as unlike my father
as I could imagine.
Black hair and beard salt
and peppered, eyes like two olives,
his nose large as a kaiser roll.
There was a clammy taint
about his apron, a marrow-essence,
a smudge of blood on his arm.
He laughed, and I shrank behind
my father's thighs. All talk
is lost in grammarless memory.
In my father's footsteps,
I watched the rituals of commerce
among the freezer cases –
wallet's flip, chime of coin,
the stiff brown bag,
top end rolled cigar-tight,
hanging from his hand.
The incense of cigarettes.
Before the street
the neon arc buzzed NESSETACILED.
I wondered what it meant,
that sudden yearning toward
curves of light, an appetite
blessed by circumstance.
Then I saw I was inside. The walls,
their shelves, the rows of cans
and bottles and paper-wrapped provisions,
the quiet meats and cheeses,
the refrigerator, my father
and the other man, the antipodal
sign itself, all breathed, or seemed
to breathe, or mutter, or stumble
toward articulations I couldn't
yet imagine. We left the way we'd come,
but everything had changed – first,
I was alone, despite my father's
warm, firm hand. Each car that passed
seemed burdened with its own
immobile bulk, each house sat
harsh and bright and dumb,
every stranger's face smiled
with a kind of gentle stupidity
I shouldn't have seen for years.
And the filthy, fecund street,
unending gate-latched iron fences,
factories of proud bricks piled
high to nowhere with windows . . .
Who could sleep? And yet I slept,
and dreamed that words could crack,
break on my tongue, fix broken thought,
catch time and keep it still,
and care for sense with assonance.
Talk
At times my mother's tongue
would fix itself.
Away from family,
she'd lose the glottal stop
she'd gotten from the street,
dropped Rs began to rise,
syllables drawn
in sharp spoken clicks.
As if diction marked
sophistication,
she'd make the impression,
and by that fiction shield herself
from other people's opinion.
It just happened. It wasn't subtle.
Among half-strangers
or those for whom the language
of protocol is essential,
she'd speak correctly, clearly,
carefully. Sometimes,
she'd surprise herself
with what she said
under such pretensions.
"I think I have to disagree."
"The sky is certainly
inspirational tonight,
isn't it?" "What a lovely table."
This might seem funny.
But when her speech was clipped,
cut-up by antagonists,
those close-cropped consonants
broke new ground. Listeners stopped,
cocked their heads, attention caught.