Lorrie Goldensohn
ELMORE
Elmore Leonard says
if it sounds like writing take it out.
How can he not know
some of my best hours on earth
have been spent in reading writing?
Luscious. Unnecessary. Words
apoplexing on the page, collecting
like the thrush that just alit
on the outermost tip of the elderberry branch--
shaking it as he leaves--leaves, feathers,
a pulsation of skin and hollow bone lifting.
Do not own every book you like.
Thing thing and thing--years in gathering.
Stuffed into every room of your house,
they litter the bathroom floor,
brown-blotched with coffee and tea spill--
they also oil up good on the kitchen table.
Left with the open pages
that faced the rain on the porch,
I try not to wince
at the ruffled mess they dry into.
I am my underlinings in soft pencil.
Taking up all that space in the basement
even after, your back breaking,
you haul ten cartons out to the car
for the yearly sale at the town library:
from a thousand paper cuts, your mind
undergoing a tiny hemorrhage
as your past seeps out the door with them.
They have broken you.
Broken into and become you.
NIMITZ TRAIL
The coral flash of a girl’s running shoes
are tipping, ticking towards me:
ahead,
the little twist of that toddler’s neck,
a crisp of sunlight streaking her profile
within the canvas hood of her stroller,
bouncing in front of her bouncing,
panting, pushing dad. The toddler
looks back, checking for him.
Why are you so joyless?
Big in your episodic speech to me,
the bruised elbow, or was it the pulled
muscle in your left calf--or
some other damned injury natural
to your age and its bodily deployments. It is
not my friend who is dying
who troubles you, his beautiful
face laid back on the cushion
of his terrible easy chair,
a face
full of suppressed suffering--
after all you have never known him--
he does not come to mind.
Nor is it say the news photo
of some weeks back,
a child brought up from the well,
a dead child where you can see
the wide gash in its throat
washed all too clean.
I charge you
in the teeth of what we see
to be happy. Complain a little less.
VIOLIN
Four hundred years
since the fragile, intricate thing
left its maker’s hands
to go to her, where she sways and bends
and holds its helplessness so close,
fiercely striking it with her bow,
dangerously tending its ancient wants
If you tried to balance the curvy
instrument on your palm, it would tip
it would tilt--resisting you
should you attempt
in some brutal impropriety
--never having seen such an instrument--
to hold it by the strung neck
and try it as some kind of club
you would only hurt the tender body
which would shatter as you struck
There is no way to hold it
but the right one
her face bent, side of the jaw and chin
clamping the chin-rest
the rippling fingers the flexed wrist
weightless the left arm making its cradle
Even if un-tuned when you accidentally
tap it with the bow,
drops of music scatter from it
FISKE TERRACE, BROOKLYN 2014
Porched, embayed, pillared, and towered--
the houses across the street
shoulder up from the wide pavement,
four stories up, my desk chair level
with the tips of their blotched plane trees.
For weeks, you and I have been arguing,
our keyboards tapping out sporadic attack
followed by insistent defense--for you,
what humans do is botched and unnatural:
only non-human life is blameless!
But when a weasel scourges the hencoop,
its digestive economy not to kill
what it eats, but like the cat merely
to play with its prey, is it not like the sow
fattening on its farrow--no animal a class
apart from the woman selling her daughter,
or Great Agribusiness torturing poultry.
Four-legged, two-legged, winged
and slick-bellied creatures waste, ravage
and feel unacceptable things. Why
spend your rage on the ugly nature
of one and not the other?
Below me stretch the broken sidewalks,
the damp asphalt along which the bicycles
whish--all firm under our consequent young.
By dusk the windows orange with light.
Behind them hundreds press and pass unseen--
although in the apartment above me I know
my solitary neighbor to be ninety years old.
It is not hers--but the loud snoring of the man
below us that seeps through the fissures of the building,
as if the building were feeling its way into sleep…
Breathe--rattle, crescendo--then breathe and descend…
start all over again. My toes tingle as I wait.
Why are we still alive? Our peers
underground, or burnt and scattered,
while others of us gasp from inhalers, or fumble
for our medications--some of us this minute
unconscious under the knife--some of us
awake and trapped inside machines with dials
and humming transformers, the name
itself the crudest irony--because
eventually we will all die, maybe a few months,
or maybe a few years later than we planned to.
My friend, a growling disgust for our species
fills you--as you hold out
patchwork amnesty for the despoiling despoiled--
while I have only the near stupidity of hope,
groping among the victims.
Listen, if the cheetahs had wandered
into governing the world, they
would not have made our mess, it’s true--
just a different one.
Elmore Leonard says
if it sounds like writing take it out.
How can he not know
some of my best hours on earth
have been spent in reading writing?
Luscious. Unnecessary. Words
apoplexing on the page, collecting
like the thrush that just alit
on the outermost tip of the elderberry branch--
shaking it as he leaves--leaves, feathers,
a pulsation of skin and hollow bone lifting.
Do not own every book you like.
Thing thing and thing--years in gathering.
Stuffed into every room of your house,
they litter the bathroom floor,
brown-blotched with coffee and tea spill--
they also oil up good on the kitchen table.
Left with the open pages
that faced the rain on the porch,
I try not to wince
at the ruffled mess they dry into.
I am my underlinings in soft pencil.
Taking up all that space in the basement
even after, your back breaking,
you haul ten cartons out to the car
for the yearly sale at the town library:
from a thousand paper cuts, your mind
undergoing a tiny hemorrhage
as your past seeps out the door with them.
They have broken you.
Broken into and become you.
NIMITZ TRAIL
The coral flash of a girl’s running shoes
are tipping, ticking towards me:
ahead,
the little twist of that toddler’s neck,
a crisp of sunlight streaking her profile
within the canvas hood of her stroller,
bouncing in front of her bouncing,
panting, pushing dad. The toddler
looks back, checking for him.
Why are you so joyless?
Big in your episodic speech to me,
the bruised elbow, or was it the pulled
muscle in your left calf--or
some other damned injury natural
to your age and its bodily deployments. It is
not my friend who is dying
who troubles you, his beautiful
face laid back on the cushion
of his terrible easy chair,
a face
full of suppressed suffering--
after all you have never known him--
he does not come to mind.
Nor is it say the news photo
of some weeks back,
a child brought up from the well,
a dead child where you can see
the wide gash in its throat
washed all too clean.
I charge you
in the teeth of what we see
to be happy. Complain a little less.
VIOLIN
Four hundred years
since the fragile, intricate thing
left its maker’s hands
to go to her, where she sways and bends
and holds its helplessness so close,
fiercely striking it with her bow,
dangerously tending its ancient wants
If you tried to balance the curvy
instrument on your palm, it would tip
it would tilt--resisting you
should you attempt
in some brutal impropriety
--never having seen such an instrument--
to hold it by the strung neck
and try it as some kind of club
you would only hurt the tender body
which would shatter as you struck
There is no way to hold it
but the right one
her face bent, side of the jaw and chin
clamping the chin-rest
the rippling fingers the flexed wrist
weightless the left arm making its cradle
Even if un-tuned when you accidentally
tap it with the bow,
drops of music scatter from it
FISKE TERRACE, BROOKLYN 2014
Porched, embayed, pillared, and towered--
the houses across the street
shoulder up from the wide pavement,
four stories up, my desk chair level
with the tips of their blotched plane trees.
For weeks, you and I have been arguing,
our keyboards tapping out sporadic attack
followed by insistent defense--for you,
what humans do is botched and unnatural:
only non-human life is blameless!
But when a weasel scourges the hencoop,
its digestive economy not to kill
what it eats, but like the cat merely
to play with its prey, is it not like the sow
fattening on its farrow--no animal a class
apart from the woman selling her daughter,
or Great Agribusiness torturing poultry.
Four-legged, two-legged, winged
and slick-bellied creatures waste, ravage
and feel unacceptable things. Why
spend your rage on the ugly nature
of one and not the other?
Below me stretch the broken sidewalks,
the damp asphalt along which the bicycles
whish--all firm under our consequent young.
By dusk the windows orange with light.
Behind them hundreds press and pass unseen--
although in the apartment above me I know
my solitary neighbor to be ninety years old.
It is not hers--but the loud snoring of the man
below us that seeps through the fissures of the building,
as if the building were feeling its way into sleep…
Breathe--rattle, crescendo--then breathe and descend…
start all over again. My toes tingle as I wait.
Why are we still alive? Our peers
underground, or burnt and scattered,
while others of us gasp from inhalers, or fumble
for our medications--some of us this minute
unconscious under the knife--some of us
awake and trapped inside machines with dials
and humming transformers, the name
itself the crudest irony--because
eventually we will all die, maybe a few months,
or maybe a few years later than we planned to.
My friend, a growling disgust for our species
fills you--as you hold out
patchwork amnesty for the despoiling despoiled--
while I have only the near stupidity of hope,
groping among the victims.
Listen, if the cheetahs had wandered
into governing the world, they
would not have made our mess, it’s true--
just a different one.
Copyright © Lorrie Goldensohn 2019
Lorrie Goldensohn has published poems in The New Republic, Yale Review, Notre Dame Review, and Salmagundi. Columbia University Press published two books of hers, one a study of Elizabeth Bishop, which was nominated for a Pulitzer, another a book on 20th century British and American soldier poets, nominated for a Book Critics Circle Award, and a third, an anthology of American War Poetry. Her work has previously appeared in Molly Bloom 7 and 8.