This was for a long time what I thought I was going to call my second book of poems, though I was told to shorten it to “All That Struggled in You Not to Drown,” because the poem of the same title, a long love poem for my wife, is my favorite poem in the book. Recently, as one of the readers in “Body of Work,” the Queens in Love with Literature (QUILL) kickoff event for 2011 – 2012 – I am on the QUILL advisory committee – I had the opportunity to read “I Fell in Love with All That Struggled in You Not to Drown” accompanied by dancer/choreographer Keomi Tarver’s improvisations. The entire event was about the interplay between dance and poetry. Mine and Keomi’s performance was captured in these two videos. The text of the three poems, “Poem from the Barnes & Noble Café,” “I Fell in Love with All That Struggled in You Not to Drown (Movement 1)” and “Waiting for It All to Crumble Step by Step Beneath My Feet,” appears below. (Unfortunately, I don’t know how to make this WordPress template play nice with the original lineation.) I hope you enjoy them:
Part 1
Part 2
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Poem From The Barnes and Noble Café
1.
When I started walking
I wasn’t counting steps.
I was thinking how these days
were not what I’d hoped
life would reduce me to,
but when I crossed the street,
the switch that throws itself
inside my brain
whenever I walk alone
threw itself, and I was mouthing
numbers, tallying each stride
as if I were building meaning.
Then I was here, in the bookstore,
looking for that volume
on Iranian cinema, which I found
more easily than I thought I would,
so I rode the escalator
down to Music — a whim;
I haven’t bought a CD
in months — and almost knocked
an olive-skinned man
with a black and white keffiyeh
wrapped around his neck
into Britney Spears’ nearly naked
cardboard flesh. I grabbed his arm
to steady him; he gripped me back,
and someone slowing down to watch
might’ve thought we were old friends.
He continued on. I turned, stared
at the fringed fabric hanging down
the brown leather of his jacket—
so much like a tallis, I thought—
and recalled my own keffiyeh,
bought twenty years ago,
after Sabra and Shatila, from a
Black man with French-tinged English.
A shill for the Arabs,
my grandmother bit into air
I know she wished was him
when she saw it. I wish
the keffiyeh had meant
solidarity, or sympathy, or anything
better than escape, but it was
an escape, and wearing it
was a kind of freedom,
as there is freedom in wandering
these aisles, putting aside
Tangerine Dream for Axiom of Choice,
for a blues compilation we could dance to,
or for the Klezmatics, whose music
on the sound system also
invites dance, and so I’m dancing
a small shuffle into Show Tunes,
remembering Surprise Lake Camp’s
Fiddler On The Roof, the boy
who played Tevye, fat and athletic,
and when he danced, his belly
bounced out from under
his white shirt, and his tzitzis twirled
in the red stage lighting
like poorly placed stripper’s tassels,
and we all clapped, laughing,
singing along, hoping
it would never end. I moved him
the way I move myself, step-by-step
through the choreography,
keeping time with a chord
on the grand piano
that echoes in me still
as I bring the songs I want
to the cash register. I sign for them
as I’ve signed for so much else in my life
and take the escalator up three flights
for a cup of mint tea. Turning
from the counter, I catch
in the corner of my eye
the keffiyeh from downstairs
opening to a square, folding
to a triangle, and the man
I bumped into smiles at me,
nods at the chairs he and his friends
are getting up from, drapes
the cloth around his neck,
and leaves. On his table,
The New York Times: priests
using children for sex,
and George W. Bush wants
money to promote marriage
and to fight a war he says
will rid us of our fears.
I’m thinking how much
the world needs fear right now,
to step back from the mouth
of what has not yet happened,
like you’d want a suicide bomber to do,
or a soldier with orders to shoot civilians.
When you and I danced at our wedding,
arms raised, hands tracing
Persian rhythms in the air,
and when they lifted us on chairs
and danced the hora, your family
and mine, whatever we erased
it was not difference,
and so music is an answer
to the question I’m trying to ask,
for it is nothing when we come together
if it is not rhythm and melody,
counterpoint and harmony,
and you push yourself against my mouth,
and I’m kissing every year you’ve lived,
each thousand years of your country’s history,
the centuries of Islam, carpets
woven, children
nursed, harvests
lost to the weather, the will
of god, all of it
vibrating live beneath your skin,
and you guide me, with your own hand
take me to the spot
where fear and hope, pain
and joy, merge to become
the irreducible fact of your flesh,
and it’s like when the band reaches
the last beat, and the dancers
hang suspended
in the final resolution:
It is peace, and if they, if we,
could stay there, there would be peace.
2.
I remember Joe taking Patty and me one night to Jones Beach. Don’t try to swim, he warned. The undertow will drag you out. We walked in up to our ankles. Patty started dancing, kicking her legs up in a clumsy can-can, splashing me till my shirt was soaked through. When we got home, we slept in the same bed.
After the murder — Rose, Patty’s mother, was found stuffed in a hall closet, stabbed sixteen times with a serrated knife; Joe was the only suspect, but there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute — after the murder, I kept to myself, huddled with friends Patty didn’t know. When she came to tell me she was leaving to live with her aunt in New Jersey, I stood away from her, a monosyllabic Bye! my only answer.
When Joe came a few weeks later to collect his stuff, the woman from next door hid in our hall closet, the one where the termites had swarmed earlier in the year. She knew, she said, things she was afraid to tell the cops.
That was also the year Sandy got sick for the last time, and she knew she was going to die, had refused to be my girlfriend because of it. I didn’t go see her, never, that I remember, worried she might want to see me — and then she died.
I’m not being hard on myself.
I know I was only thirteen, and love at that age denies dying, but now I’m forty, and the little boy who calls me Richard instead of Dad could die tomorrow. As could you. As many will, even perhaps the man with the keffiyeh, in whose paper I read another headline: three youths, Arabs, arrested in France for bombing a synagogue I could’ve been in, and of course Israel should pull out now, and of course Palestine’s independence should be declared this moment,
the earth transformed to a tent where we all break bread,
each of us carrying what we’ve seen
the way musicians carry music
in the moments before they start playing.
This poem appears in my first book, The Silence of Men.
Waiting for It All to Crumble Step by Step Beneath my Feet
I watch you walk away from the first sex we’ve had
in more months than either of us would like to admit,
and my breath catches at the light shining
from the full nakedness of your back, as if your skin
has taken in the long brightness that held us
as I held you holding me, and now
that the sun has moved past our window,
your body alone illuminates this room;
and from the garden downstairs
that is a garden I have carried in me
since I was younger than the little boy
whose play date has granted us these hours,
children’s laughter, an adult’s call
not to swing so high, and the same squeak
from when I was Shahob’s age
of the swing itself, a rusty metronome
keeping the beat of my life in Jackson Heights,
where I never thought I’d settle down.
Yesterday, I sat in the garden’s south end
thinking that I have never almost died,
not even the way my friend
who would’ve been beneath
the World Trade Center
“almost died,” except
she’d found just months before
a new job in another state,
so she was teaching
The Comedy of Errors in Colorado
when the first plane hit.
The garden’s morning quiet
was more quiet than usual.
No pigeon congregation searched
the circular wood-chip middle for food;
no squirrels foraged; but then
a black shape spread its wings against the leaves,
casting a shadow on the 52 building’s back wall,
and I understood the bones picked clean
that we’ve been stepping over
when we walk the quiet center
the garden is at night.
The hawk allowed the air to carry it
to a branch midway up the oak that wasn’t here
when this grass was a football field for me and Claudia Joel
and Sundays meant dinner and Wild Kingdom
at grandma and grandpa’s. In one episode,
Marlon Perkins — or maybe it was his assistant Jim—
wrestled in a South American rain forest river
an anaconda thicker in my memory
than my thighs are now. I didn’t know
the scene would not have made it to the screen
if he had died, so when I saw the snake
pull beneath the river’s current
what I was sure would be
that man’s last living day,
I closed my eyes,
as I close them now,
wanting to see the moment
he broke the water’s surface
back into life, but it’s Armon’s
face that comes to me,
too scared to climb the fence,
and so he turns, hoping there’s a path
to lead him to the other side,
but it’s moonless mountain dark,
and he cannot know that where he steps is dirt
that’s been waiting at the cliff’s edge for days
for a reason to crumble.
Tomorrow,
we will hug his parents and his sister
in their grief and maybe find some words
to help them heal, but also
we will stand there giving silent thanks
our son is not the one we’ve come to mourn.
Before you took him with you to Iran,
Shahob drew a map connecting here
to wherever there was in his imagination,
tracing each part of the journey
on its own sheet of paper. This way,
he explained, I could find you in an emergency,
and you would not get lost on your way home.
He mixed and matched the sections
till the contours fit the shape
the trip made in his mind;
we taped them together and he smiled.
Now I can leave, he said, kissing me.
The night President Bush ordered our military
to teach what the TV news commentator called
the true meaning of terror to those monsters in Afghanistan,
I dug with Shahob through the rock
hiding in our living room
dinosaur fossils we had to find
before he could sleep, so focused
on digging ever deeper into the private earth
he’d conjured for us to explore
that I did not once raise my eyes to the window
framing the column of white smoke
still rising from the lower Manhattan skyline;
and as I sat yesterday in the garden,
filling myself with these memories,
the moment came back to me when watching
that same smoke through that same window
transformed the child safety bars
the law required us to install
into the bars of a closed cage, and I thought
how each day since Shahob was born
has mapped our lives for us,
and will do so until we die.
The hawk took off again,
swooped low to the ground,
but nothing was there for its claws to close on,
so it rose, majestic, to rest its wings
among the branches keeping sunlight
from the spot in the children’s garden
where parents set their sons and daughters up
to play with water.
When I tell you what I saw, you’ll insist
those mothers and fathers need to watch the sky,
that a bird of prey wants prey and doesn’t care
if it’s a pigeon, a squirrel or a child.
///
The phone rings
just as the flush
finishes: our boy
calling that he’s ready
to come home.
I worry for him, you say,
pulling on your clothes,
picking up where we left off
before we got undressed.
Before you know it,
he’ll be old enough to draft,
and if it’s not Iraq, it will be Iran.
Imagine! My son drafted
to invade my country.
You lie down next to me,
draping one denim-covered leg
across my penis
that is half in love
with rising again.
Smiling at the inhaled pleasure
the gesture draws from me,
you push my arms
above my head. This was fun,
you whisper, as if our son
were already home. If we had time,
I’d do you again, with my clothes on,
and the rule would be
if your hands moved
from where they are right now,
I’d stop.
I smile back
but then you’re out the door,
and I know you’re trying not to make the list
of all the ways you’ve thought that he could die
before he should. Me? I’m replaying
the magician we watched last night,
the tablecloth he pulled from underneath
a wine-glass-filled service for four
without spilling a single drop.
Shahob asked me how it’s done
and would not accept my ignorance.
What do you imagine the secret is? he kept asking,
because nothing he imagines
feels impossible to him.
I Fell in Love with All That Struggled in You Not to Drown
First Movement
Inching the car today
past what Shahob called snorts
for his first eighteen months of words,
the rhythm circling in me
was a riff the composer in my head
lifted whole from the song—
Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps”—
that sent me back to Floral Park, the bird
Jamie and I watched flap wounded to the ground,
and how he lied when the cops found his gun.
Then the beat changed, fast
triplets I drummed the wheel to,
conjuring you instead, pen in hand, the desk lamp
casting your shadow large against the wall behind you.
You whisper the lines to yourself as you write them,
believing this joy language brings
is all you’ll ever want. You’re seventeen,
and your poems hint, or maybe more than hint—
I’ve asked but you say you don’t remember—
that a daughter’s life, or a wife’s,
is less than you hope for, and so maybe
your parents feared the promiscuity they were taught
that women who dare what I am daring
here at my desk
become addicted to, or maybe
poetry kept you from your schoolwork.
All you’ll say is they pressured you to stop
and you did.
The traffic eased,
and the DJ played “Born To Be Wild,”
and as I sped singing past Lakeville Road
hoping to make up lost time,
I was singing for you,
aching to know the girl you were,
to have been the teacher, no, the friend
to whom you showed that first ghazal
you couldn’t keep to yourself,
because love means giving the world
the room it needs to move through you,
and love, in this past I am imagining for us,
was the word you stitched your couplets with,
as it was also, corny but true,
the chorus I turned the car off in the middle of—
The Beatles’ “All You Need Is…” — when I parked.
In class, we talked fashion: piercings
and why men shouldn’t wear thongs
unless they’re strippers,
and not one of my students
thought pink on a man
could mean anything but gay,
and I remembered—
no, it wasn’t memory;
you’ve never told me — I imagined
you getting dressed for school the first day
of the public womanhood
the ayatollahs gave you no choice
but to learn to wear.
The breeze has been my lover,
you recite to yourself in the mirror,
and the sun, and you tuck
under your chador
the last few strands of hair
you need to cover, check
the length of your sleeves
and that your ankles
if you have to run
won’t emerge into light.
And I have let the ocean pull me naked to its chest,
and with my fingers probed the earth’s flesh,
and filled my mouth with its fruit.
Then you pick up your book bag, call goodbye,
and appear next in this film I’m scripting
with the front door closed behind you,
a fledgling crow with no wings to spread
and a gauntlet of enemies to walk.
You move out into the gaze
of Tehran’s great male eye,
stepping small onto the street
where, when you were eight,
you left that flasher
standing by your sister’s bike,
convinced you wanted
what he held in his hand
and all he had to do
was wait right there
till you returned
with your mother’s permission,
and he did wait — you watched him
through the front window of your house—
long enough that you feared
he’d never leave, but then, finally, he left.
Now, stripped of any words
that might protect you,
convinced your cover
will never cover enough,
you move forward,
filling your eyes with nothing
that is not the three inches of air
directly in front of your face.
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In case you’re interested, I have since changed my second book’s title to Because Men Only Understand Cliches–mostly because I think it makes a really interesting follow up to The Silence of Men, which was the title of my first book.
This is probably the coolest poetry performance I’ve ever seen. Congratulations, Richard, on a spectacular presentation of how art meets art.
Thanks so much! (He says, blushing.) I think we should try to do something like this at school.